Description
Book SynopsisExamines the relationship between race representation and popular fiction from 1893 to the present, as well as its impact on historiography, economics, and law.
Trade Review"In a book that pays equal attention to the protocols and history of genre reading and to contemporary critical theories of race, Mark Jerng shows how techniques of worldbuilding in science fiction and fantasy and attention to setting as site of literary innovation define textual and interpretive strategies for producing race at levels other than biological differences or overtly racialized characters or authors, shifting the analysis of race and racism away from visual epistemology to allow them to be understood as embedded in fictional worlds." -- -Thomas Foster author of The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory "Racial Worldmaking meets the irresistible demand for scholarship that recognizes the central role of perceiving and speculating about race in American literature and culture. By situating race as a structuring principle within legal doctrines, literary traditions, and economic philosophies, Jerng interrogates the fictions that buttress dominant racial ideologies and calls attention to the imaginative work performed by thinkers who take racism seriously. Racial Worldmaking moves beyond disciplinary conventions to apply lessons learned from critical race theories and advance vital lines of inquiry inaugurated by Black and Asian American intellectuals." -- -andre carrington author of Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Racial Worldmaking
Part I. Yellow Peril Genres
Chapter 1. Worlds of Color
Chapter 2. Futures Past of Asiatic Racialization
Part II. Plantation Romance
Chapter 3. Romance and Racism after the Civil War
Chapter 4. Reconstructing Racial Perception
Part III. Sword and Sorcery
Chapter 5. The “Facts” of Blackness and Anthropological Worlds
Chapter 6. Fantasies of Blackness and Racial Capitalism
Part IV. Alternate History
Chapter 7. Racial Counterfactuals and the Uncertain Event of Emancipation
Chapter 8. World War II and Uncertain Forms of Racial Organization
Conclusion: Towards an Anti-racist Racial Worldmaking
Notes
Index
